The oldest son is the only one who survives. He goes to America. He makes a life for himself, a good life. But as he gets to be around the age his parents were when they died, he starts to have nightmares about his mother. He becomes obsessed by the fact that the Germans didn’t give her a number, that there’s no record of her death, no proof. It’s not that he thinks she’s alive, you understand. He saw her get sent into the nonworkers line, and he doesn’t have any illusions about what that meant. But he can’t process the idea that she just…vanished.
So he saves up his money. He goes back to Poland. He advertises in the newspapers, literally for years, offering a reward to anyone who can give him a photograph of his mother, anyone who even remembers his mother. No one ever answers. This woman had grown up, gone to university, taught grade school, been a daughter and a wife and a mother. But it was like she’d never existed. The Germans had simply wiped her from the face of history.
“That’s what’s happening to the testimonies, Cohen. When I took over, we’d already lost four hundred thousand files irretrievably. The rest are going. It’s only a matter of time. I want to save them. Not just for now. Forever.”
He looked up to find Cohen staring at him.
“I know. I know you think it’s a waste of my time. But, Cohen, I’m the first caretaker who’s had the expertise to actually fix it instead of sending endless unanswered spinmail to the Knesset budget office asking for funding that never quite arrives. If I don’t do it, who will?”
Cohen just kept looking at him, utterly still. “I know what you’re asking me to do,” he said finally. “And I know what I owe you.”
Gavi sliced his hand through the air abruptly. “You don’t owe me anything. If I hadn’t been afraid you’d say just that, I would have asked you for help far sooner. Hell, maybe I would even have answered your spinmails!”
“Oh.” Cohen grinned. “Nowyou tell me.”
“Cohen—”
“I know, I know.”
“—if you can’t say no, then how can I ever ask you for anything?”
“Harrumph. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you and Catherine and router/decomposer were all talking about me behind my back. By the way, Gavi, have you noticed that you practically went into orbit last week at the suggestion that I might lift a finger to help revive your career and now you’re cheerfully asking me to risk decoherence in order to help you with some quixotic scheme that no one else will take on for love or money?”
“What’s your point, little AI?”
“Nothing. Just thought I’d mention it. Sometimes you remind me the tiniest little bit of Leila.”
Gavi smiled—but his smile faded as he realized that he had heard her name on Cohen’s lips without feeling the old familiar pang of grief. “I wish I could remember her like you remember her,” he whispered, not trusting his voice well enough to speak out loud.
“Maybe not,” Cohen said. “There are folktales about ghosts who can’t rest until their loved ones stop mourning them. Maybe the dead are meant to fade, Gavi. Maybe the living are meant to forget.”
In Cohen’s dream, Gavi had his leg back. He stood on tiptoe because Cohen had become very tall in the dream, a mute giant of mud and clay.
Your job is done,Gavi said.
As he spoke the words Li was there, calm and clear-eyed, with Didi standing at her side.
Time to forget,they told him.
And then Li put her hands to his face, and gently, so gently, wiped the first letter of the name of truth from his forehead…
“I’ve made a life decision,” router/decomposer announced. “May I tell you about it?”
He was leaving, Cohen decided. What else could it be? And what could his departure mean but hassle and fuss, interviews and arguments, and the inevitable bad feelings that always led to further departures? Everything was falling apart, everyone was leaving him, it was all his fault, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
“Of course you can tell me,” he said with the internal equivalent of a forced smile.
“I’m going to change my name.”
“Great! I mean…er, to what?”
“Kuramoto.”
“As in Yoshiki?”
“Correct.”
Yoshiki Kuramoto. The boldly intuitive twentieth-century mathematician who had taken the first real stab at formalizing the emergence of spontaneous synchrony in certain types of complex and mathematically intractable systems, including router/decomposer’s Josephson Arrays and spin glass matrices. If router/decomposer was going to borrow someone else’s name, then Kuramoto’s was a logical, even an elegant choice.
“Why Kuramoto?”
“It’s an aspiration designation,” router/decomposer, now Kuramoto, announced with an ironic flourish that ill concealed his seriousness. “It indicates not what I am but what I aspire to become. And, uhhhh…I’m also quitting. Caltech just offered me a tenure track position in applied mathematics. Sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. What can I say? Things have been crazy.”
“Well,” Cohen said. “Caltech. That’s quite something. Have they ever hired an AI before?”
“I would seem to be the first.”
“Well, great. Wonderful.”
“It’s irrelevant, of course…but somehow I keep returning to the idea that I’d be…uh, happier,whatever that means, if you supported this decision.”
“I do. Wholeheartedly. Congratulations.”
“Do you mean that? Your affective fuzzy set for this exchange is very difficult to parse.”
“You’re telling me.”
“But you arehappy?”
“I’m happy for you.”
Kuramoto chewed on that for a near eternity by AI standards.
“Being happy for someone else sounds like a less desirable state than actually beinghappy,” he said finally.
“Let’s just say it’s an acquired taste.”
And then—as soon as he was what passed for alone—he dropped his head into his hands and laughed until the tears sprang to Roland’s eyes.
“Where are you going, Catherine?”
“Out.”
“Out to see Ash?”
“You’re behaving badly, Cohen. Stop it. And for what it’s worth I’m not sleeping with her.” Li rubbed the back of one hand across her nose.
“Frankly, I’m too allergic to this hellhole of a planet to even think about sex.”
“Why don’t we sit down and talk about whatever it is that’s bothering you?”
“Since nothing’s bothering me, it would be a short conversation.”
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
“Didn’t I just say I was?”
“I don’t mean right now. If you’d only talk to me…”
She softened, in one of those abrupt changes of mood that always threw Cohen off-balance. “You can’t help, Cohen. I know you mean well, but…you can’t.”
“So that’s it?” Cohen said. “No discussion? No questions? Just goodbye Cohen and have a nice life?”
He sat down on the bed and crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the floor. He knew he was being childish, but he couldn’t help it. And why should he help it, anyway? It wasn’t as if Li was exactly being mature about things. To make matters worse, he could feel across the quiescent intraface that she knew exactly what he was feeling. The memory of their last breakup, with all its attendant humiliation and frustration. The fearful certainty that her departure would open the door to all the old, tired, nasty ghosts that had haunted him before her arrival. The panic at the prospect of losing her for good—a panic that was sharpened rather than blunted by the crippling suspicion that it wasn’t real love, but merely his feedback loops going into emotive overdrive at the prospect of losing an inscribed player. Router/decomposer would say that motives didn’t matter, only actions. But this motive didmatter…